D : “He had played Russian roulette with himself twice before and won.”

D : A cruel word, roulette. Which means, little wheel.

D : You read this on a bus heading north to see a woman.

D : I was wearing my new white shirt.

D : And your collar was starched.

D : It was summer.

D : It was eighty-one years after Vladimir lost his first roulette.

D : And I watched the woman dive into a lake.

D : And her bathing suit was white.

D (looks at his clothes) : Still working on washing that one off, aren’t you.

D : It was like, “I can’t believe it she doesn’t scrub off in the shower.”

D : And a few years later a flood wipes the town off the map.

D : But it doesn’t wash off the woman.

D (ticked) : I do look like a poor man to you.

D : You look like a man who’s after a clean shirt.

D : And then the rest is roulette.

D : And then the rest is confetti.

D : But what if we fix ourselves stone soup for supper instead.

D : (Puts away wallet.)

D : We’ll need the white root of a turnip, and rhubarb bitters, and nectarines.

D : (Silence.)

D: And barley and chicory, and a handful of nutmeg, and bergamot.

D: (Looks down at shoes.)

D : And gunpowder tea, and rutabagas, and a few of those lines in your head.

D : How about this: “you can’t say where you end and where the dust begins.”

D : All the little ingredients that make you—you know—me.

D : And the idea is we stir them all in a pot.

D : And we throw in a stone.

D : And we find it all here, in a supermarket, before the place is picked clean.

(He takes him by the wrist. They walk.)

✖

They’re standing in front of a wall of cans.

Around them, people from the neighborhood.

Fighting for soup and bread.

D : You said you once heard a man give a lecture.

D : Schlesinger.

D : He had a beautiful skull, you said.

D : Like a witch doctor.

D : He said Shelley used to walk for hours on the beach, muttering to himself.

D : Talking nonsense, yes.

D : And stringing together these short, rhythmic phrases.

D : “Like he was stitching together a pocket,” Schlesinger said.

D : And later when Shelley walked home, he’d fill the pockets with language.

D : That’s how he wrote poems.

D : You spoke some words of your own when you walked home that night.

D : Writing a poem, it’s like coloring in a hole with language.

D (places carton in basket) : You can cross off the broth.

D (stops) : I thought that was Wordsworth, the walking.

D : You know he was a spy.

D : Conrad told me that, yeah, over a pinch of chocolate.

D : Shoveling up intelligence for the secret service.

D : And the chocolate tasted like this: to hell with you bloodsuckers.

D (takes him by the wrist) : What matters here is your mother told me a story.

D : Mother, mother, mother—she told a lot of men stories.

D : She said her son used to visit the trash cans behind the house.

D : Many men, many men. Many men used to visit behind the house.

D : She said, “My son was born with a beat in his head.”

D : She claims I used to bang on her trash cans with sticks.

D : “Until a crowd of brown toads was applauding at his feet.”

D : “He was ashamed,” she tells people. “To ask for the things that he loved.”

D : Which, at that age, was a nice pair of sticks.

D : The hickory ones.

D : “So he broke a few ribs off my drying rack,” she told me.

D : And I hid them under my bed.

D : And you waited for your solo.

D : And I waited for the family to go out for their evening walk.

D (places box in basket) : You can cross off the seasoning.

D : It was a childhood whose background music was my mother’s dismay.

D : When she realized she was no longer wearing a sun dress.

D : And dancing through a field of timothy grass.

D : You told me you remember a beach with her in July.

D : And girls dressed in summer clothes walking by the water.

D : And mother’s cassette in the tape deck.

D : And Mick Jagger singing, I see the girls walk by / dressed in their summer clothes.

D : It’s funny the way some men build empires.

D : Some men just diddle and diddle themselves until they become king.

D (stares at him):Have you forgotten what’s happening here.

D : And everyone riots in the streets when he dies.

D (places bag in basket) :Well you can cross off potatoes.

D : Yes the family would go out for walks after supper.

D : Those kind of blue-hour walks over a bridge after late rain.

D : And a golden retriever is chasing a squirrel up ahead.

D : And the neighbors they stop when they see you and say hell of a nice night isn’t it.

D : While the dog licks the salt from their palms.

(Two people from the neighborhood wrestling over a milk bone on the floor. One of them shouts something inaudible, something like, “when I drag your corpse through the mud,” but her voice gets lost in the clangor.)

D : But your neighbor’s the one with the dog and not you.

D : What matters is I liked to stay behind when the family went out for a walk.

D : A lot of men. A lot of men where you’re from stayed behind.

D (covers his eyes, doing Milton) : “Well they also serve who only stand and wait.”

D : You ever wonder if God poked out his eyes because he wrote that.

D : Instead of the other way around—yeah, all the time.

D : So you stood and you waited.

D : And when the door clicked shut I’d arrange the couch cushions in front of me.

D : And you’d what.

D : I’d beat the garbage out of them along to some songs.

D (places bottle in basket) : You can cross off the oil.

D : I liked the sound when I struck them, the cushions. It was like war drums.